IoT with Particle: publishing events

In the two previous posts, we discussed setup and talked about triggering actions and reading sensor data. Particle also allows you to publish events. You can subscribe to these events or pass them to other systems such as Azure IoT Hub.

Let’s build on the previous example with the LED and the photoresistor. When we read a high value from the photoresistor (yes, more light) we will publish a lights on event including the value we have read. When we read a low value, we will publish a lights out event.

In code, this is easily done. The setup part:

This is not very different from the earlier post. I added a boolean (true/false) variable called bright to maintain the state (is it bright or not) and we initialise the variable depending on the amount of light we measure at the start.

In the loop() part:

Above you see Particle.publish in action. We read the brightness every second. When it was not bright and brightness is above or equal to 2000, we send an event to the Particle Cloud. This way, you only publish the event when the state changes. Particle Publish takes 4 parameters:

The name of the event

The data you want to send along; here it’s the brightness value converted to a string with the built in String class and its constructor which can take an integer and returns it as a string

60 is the TTL (default and cannot be changed for now)

PRIVATE: this is a private event that only authorized subscribers can subscribe to

Lastly, we still implement the Particle Function to turn the LED on or off remotely:

The events can be tracked from the Particle Console:

The question of course is, what can you do with published events? One course of action is to use these events for communication between your IoT devices. Another Particle device can use Particle.subscribe to subscribe to the events published by other devices. Using Particle.subscribe is very simple and somewhat analogous to a Particle Function. You can find out more about it here: https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/photon/#particle-subscribe-

Another course of action is to use Particle’s IFTTT integration to use IFTTTs rich ecosystem of connected services. Particle is one of these services so just provide IFTTT with credentials to Particle and you are set!

Do know that the published events are not stored by Particle. If you want to do that, one way of achieving this is with the Azure IoT Hub integration. In a later post, I’ll talk more about that.